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The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer

The Miller’s Prologue and Tale

The Wife of Bath’s Prologue (continued)

From the beginning through the Wife of Bath’s description of her first three
husbands Fragment 3, lines 1–451

Summary

The Wife of Bath begins the Prologue to her tale by establishing
herself as an authority on marriage, due to her extensive personal
experience with the institution. Since her first marriage at the
tender age of twelve, she has had five husbands. She says that many
people have criticized her for her numerous marriages, most of them
on the basis that Christ went only once to a wedding, at Cana in
Galilee. The Wife of Bath has her own views of Scripture and God’s
plan. She says that men can only guess and interpret what Jesus
meant when he told a Samaritan woman that her fifth husband was
not her husband. With or without this bit of Scripture, no man has
ever been able to give her an exact reply when she asks to know
how many husbands a woman may have in her lifetime. God bade us
to wax fruitful and multiply, she says, and that is the text that
she wholeheartedly endorses. After all, great Old Testament figures,
like Abraham, Jacob, and Solomon, enjoyed multiple wives at once.
She admits that many great Fathers of the Church have proclaimed
the importance of virginity, such as the Apostle Paul. But, she
reasons, even if virginity is important, someone must be procreating
so that virgins can be created. Leave virginity to the perfect,
she says, and let the rest of us use our gifts as best we may—and
her gift, doubtless, is her sexual power. She uses this power as
an “instrument” to control her husbands.

At this point, the Pardoner interrupts. He is planning
to marry soon and worries that his wife will control his body, as
the Wife of Bath describes. The Wife of Bath tells him to have patience
and to listen to the whole tale to see if it reveals the truth about
marriage. Of her five husbands, three have been “good” and two have
been “bad.” The first three were good, she admits, mostly because
they were rich, old, and submissive. She laughs to recall the torments
that she put these men through and recounts a typical conversation
that she had with her older husbands. She would accuse her -husband
of having an affair, launching into a tirade in which she would
charge him with a bewildering array of accusations. If one of her
husbands got drunk, she would claim he said that every wife is out
to destroy her husband. He would then feel guilty and give her what
she wanted. All of this, the Wife of Bath tells the rest of the
pilgrims, was a pack of lies—her husbands never held these opinions,
but she made these claims to give them grief. Worse, she would tease
her husbands in bed, refusing to give them full satisfaction until
they promised her money. She admits proudly to using her verbal
and sexual power to bring her husbands to total submission.

Analysis

In her lengthy Prologue, the Wife of Bath recites her
autobiography, announcing in her very first word that “experience”
will be her guide. Yet, despite her claim that experience is her
sole authority, the Wife of Bath apparently feels the need to establish
her authority in a more scholarly way. She imitates the ways of
churchmen and scholars by backing up her claims with quotations
from Scripture and works of antiquity. The Wife carelessly flings
around references as textual evidence to buttress her argument,
most of which don’t really correspond to her points. Her reference
to Ptolemy’s Almageste, for instance, is completely
erroneous—the phrase she attributes to that book appears nowhere
in the work. Although her many errors display her lack of real scholarship,
they also convey Chaucer’s mockery of the churchmen present, who
often misused Scripture to justify their devious actions.

The text of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue is based in the
medieval genre of allegorical “confession.” In a morality play,
a personified vice such as Gluttony or Lust “confesses” his or her
sins to the audience in a life story. The Wife is exactly what the
medieval Church saw as a “wicked woman,” and she is proud of it—from
the very beginning, her speech has undertones of conflict with her
patriarchal society. Because the statements that the Wife of Bath
attributes to her husbands were taken from a number of satires published
in Chaucer’s time, which half-comically portrayed women as unfaithful,
superficial, evil creatures, always out to undermine their husbands,
feminist critics have often tried to portray the Wife as one of the
first feminist characters in literature.

This interpretation is weakened by the fact
that the Wife of Bath herself conforms to a number of these misogynist
and misogamist (antimarriage) stereotypes. For example, she describes
herself as sexually voracious but at the same time as someone who
only has sex to get money, thereby combining two contradictory stereotypes. She
also describes how she dominated her husband, playing on a fear
that was common to men, as the Pardoner’s nervous interjection reveals.
Despite their contradictions, all of these ideas about women were
used by men to support a hierarchy in which men dominated women.

his story begins off with him telling everyone about drunken Flemish people.
then talks about their vices
he is very hypercritical
hates swearing
story is about a guy who poisons everyone else so that he could have all the gold
his tale ends with him trying to sell relics even though he told everyone in his prologue that they are fake

After further inspection I'd like to point out that John doesn't actually seem all that jealous. Just because the narrator says he is doesn't mean his actions point that way. He leaves Alisoun alone with Nicholas and he lets her listen to Absolon's love song.

Perhaps John is simple "sely" or naive, rather than jealous. He says he loves her more than his life, so maybe John is just blinded to her betrayal because he loves his wife so much. That might be a better moral to the story. He still cares about the earthly world (his wife) mor